Friday, November 08, 2013

IRINGA, 7 November 2013 (IRIN) - For more than a decade Tanzania has
been wooing foreign investors to help modernize and reinvigorate its
agricultural sector - which engages about 80 percent of the population -
as a way of boosting national development.

But many supposed beneficiaries, such as smallholder Ahmed Kipanga, a
37-year-old father of five from the coastal Kisarawe District, feel
short-changed.

“I used to till my land and grow enough food to feed my family,” he told
IRIN in Mbeya, 600km south of a home he no longer has access to, adding
that he was also able to earn around US$250 selling his surplus crop
for each of the year’s two seasons.

“I just gave my land because we were convinced by a politician that it
would make us rich. I knew I would get money for the land, and also get a
well-paying job when the [investment] company began operations. Now
they didn’t do anything and they sold our land to another company we
didn’t even know,” he added.

“We have been chasing our money for the land but they [district
officials] keep telling different things every time we go for the money.
I am not sure we will be paid [compensation],” he said.

Kipanga now has no farm to grow food on and struggles to make ends meet
by crushing rocks manually. A 7-tonne truckload brings in around $90, a
sum he splits with two friends. Demand for the rocks is irregular.

In 2009, Kipanga was among 1,500 residents of 11 villages whose combined
8,211 hectares were leased to a British company that planned to grow jatropha as a biofuel. The villages were given verbal promises of jobs, paved roads, new schools and a hospital.

But, as jatropha turned out to be less of a miracle
crop than envisaged, the project collapsed after a couple of years and
was bought out by another firm which has left it dormant, employing only
a handful of security guards to keep other villagers off the land.

According to the Oakland Institute, a US think tank which documented this particular case as well land deals at the national
and continental level, not only are the villagers worse off now,
landless, jobless and with no compensation, but they also suffered a
drop in income and living standards even when the project was
functioning.

Some 27 agricultural investment deals have been signed in Tanzania since 2008, covering 274,228 hectare, according to data compiled by the Land Matrix.
Of these, 11 projects have either been abandoned (including a 34,000
hectare jatropha plantation in Kilwa District), or have yet to start
production more than a year after contracts were signed. Just eight are
operational.

In all, the Oakland Institute says, some 4.5 million hectares in
Tanzania is being sought by foreign investors planning biofuel or food
production and encouraged by the 2009 adoption of the Kilimo Kwanza
(Agriculture First) initiative.

This includes the so-called AgriSol deal,
which, if it eventually goes through in the face of fierce local
opposition, could see some 160,000 people displaced from their land in
Mpanda District, Katabi Region, in the far west of the country.

But, for the authors of a 2012 paper
by the International Growth Centre the effects have yet to trickle
down: “[P]erformance in agricultural output and productivity has been
disappointing. Policies and plans, such as `agriculture is the mainstay
of the economy’ and Kilimo Kwanza have remained [mere] slogans to the
public as there is so little experience of reforms that have improved
livelihoods, and millions in the agriculture sector remain in poverty.”

Inadequate land-management legislation, the opaqueness of the deals and
the widespread lack of title deeds have conspired to make large-scale
land investment deals particularly problematic.

“There is mounting evidence that most deals have failed to deliver on
their promises,” Lorenzo Cotula, land rights and natural resources
specialist at the Institute for Environment and International
Development (IIED), told IRIN.

“Villagers have lost land, many investments have been discontinued, and
jobs have been few and short-lived. Success stories are difficult to
come by,” he added.

“The law regulating the deals makes villagers vulnerable to
dispossession. National laws only recognize weak land rights to rural
people, and legal safeguards are ineffective,” he said.

Other problems cited by Cotula include inadequate local consultation, non-compliance with legal requirements and conflict.

For Oakland Institute Executive Director Anuradha Mittal, across the
world, “these largely unregulated land acquisitions are resulting in
virtually none of the promised benefits for local populations, but
instead are forcing millions of small farmers off ancestral lands and
small, local food farms in order to make room for export commodities.”

A senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office, who asked not to be
named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, defended the
government’s move to lease out land to foreign investors.

“Those cases that have failed are like any business that faces risks.
These foreign investors have the money to set up large farms which would
ensure people have employment and we can feed ourselves as a nation,”
he told IRIN.

“But I believe there are certain things we can do better like ensuring
that people receive compensations for the land they live on. We must
ensure people have some form of proof of ownership which we haven’t done
adequately,” he added.

“This programme began in 2009 and I believe because acquisitions for
related investments can drag on for years at times, I believe it is too
early to judge its success.”

The way ahead

For land deals to benefit farmers, says Cotula, “villagers must have
greater control over their resources, through stronger rights but also
through collective action that can give real leverage to legal rights.”

Yefred Myenzi, the director of Haki Ardhi, a local land rights advocacy
organization, said joint ventures between the local communities owning
the land and investors could help ensure local communities do not lose
out.

“Out-grower schemes [where the farmers continue to own their land but
produce on behalf of the investor] have also been proposed in which
case, the investor provides technical support and market whereas the
farmers retain their land and produce with assurance of selling their
produce,” Myenzi, told IRIN.

In 2012 activists welcomed a government announcement that it would cap
the size of investment deals at 10,000 hectares, but although this was
supposed to come into effect in January, it has yet to do so.

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